Readers' comments

F1 like many other things in life is cyclic. Red Bull is on the upside and the others are playing catch up. McLaren is closer to the others to overtake them. I wonder if after a few years on the downside, they will continue to invest. Don't get me wrong, it's great that we have variety in the sport and as of lately, we've seen different team take the honours, but at the end of the day, it will be always Ferrari, McLaren and Willims the ones that continue to participate, regardless of the results.

That's because the creator of Red Bull's drink was Thai, Chaleo Yoovidhya, who recently died. Dietrich Mateschitz was a toothpaste salesman when he met Chaleo who had invented the drink a few years before they met. If you read the comments below you will see the correction requested.

The crossed out text is to indicate the correction was made - it's common in the blogosphere to do this so as to admit you listen to your readers. I think it's something the mainstream news sites should do more of to be honest, the BBC's website has a few issues here and there but they are never corrected, or if they are, then silently.

Sorry FifthDecade i think you misinterpreted my sarcasm and, it seems, a few other points along the way...

Correct me if i am wrong but the 'strikethrough' was present in the original article, any post-publishing corrections are normally made and subsequently acknowledged at the bottom of the revised article (see the correction at the bottom of this article re "McClaren") or, if in print, in the following weeks copy.

My understanding of using strikethrough on the "blogosphere" as you put it, is to convey to the reader a deliberate change of thought by the author. Generally in a 'tongue-in-cheek' manner.

Yes. You seemed to have assumed William Bangkok posted after the crossing through, whereas its more likely it is his comment that pointed out the original error, which makes your sarcasm look rather silly. On the other hand, it could be as you say and the author put down both the edited and non edited text in his original article. Whichever, sarcasm is the lowest form of wit.

Younger readers may like to know that Mercedes'were racing in prewar events,it may not have been F1,but those were the great days of drivers such as Von Brauchisch,Prince Bira,Rudi Caracciola,and the Brits Raymond Mayes and Earl Howe.

Younger readers may like to know that Mercedes'were racing in prewar events,it may not have been F1,but those were the great days of drivers such as Von Brauchisch,Prince Bira,Rudi Caracciola,and the Brits Raymond Mayes and Earl Howe.

@F1FanUSA - You are forgetting Christian Horner who ran the sports best-run and most successful Formula 3 team before Red Bull bought the team and transferred Horner and his management style to the main F1 team. Adrian Newey is a very good designer , but his lack of success at well funded McLaren shows he alone is not the sole element needed for success.

@open city - Red Bull uses a customer Renault engine, as do Williams and the ex-Renault team, now competing as Lotus.

@ScottA613 - Red Bull do not use a Ferrari engine, that is their sister team, Toro Rosso. Red Bull have always used Renault engines.

Sadly, the BBC is not covering the whole season's races live and have lost out to Sky, which means F1 will lose out as fewer people will watch the racing on Sky than on the BBC, which means fewer ad views.

Mr. Horner deserves a lot of credit, I agree. I think it speaks volumes that Ferrari has repeatedly made extreme monetary offers for Mr. Newey's talents - though not to lure away Mr. Horner. Ferrari seems to agree with me that Mr. Newey has devised some unique design elements that gave that Red Bull car at times a second a lap or more on the rest of the field the past few seasons.

Thanks for that, my bad, but Red Bull only had real success after they changed to Renault engines. Of course there were a lot of other factors too but Renault was part of their success package; Ferrari and Cosworth were not.

I wouldn't put a lot of store by what Ferrari thinks is a good strategy, given their lack of success since they got rid of Ross Brawn and Jean Todt and replaced them with a lot of Italians. Having said that, of course Adrian Newey is a great designer - when he was at Williams his cars were unbeatable. His cars were also very good at Red Bull of late, but there is more to a team's success than the designer alone. My point was that if Adrian alone was the magic bullet every team needed to become succesful, then McLaren would also have been successful when he designed cars for them, but he was not. Because he was not successful then - despite the high budgets McLaren have consistently been able to call on - he alone could not be a magic bullet.

As for Ferrari, they have enough money to be able to steal people from other teams just to destabilise those teams by removing valuable components. A typical example of this was the end of season poaching of Fisichella from Force India at the 2009 Belgium GP. Fisi had qualified on Pole for the Spa race, and was then approached by Ferrari to replace the injured Felipe Massa. After a safety car start, rather than combat Ferrari's Raikkonen aggressively, Fisichella allowed his future team mate through rather too easily. Fisi had the fastest car for the whole race, but did not pass Raikkonnen's Ferrari at any time. Raikkonnen won, Fisichella came second. He blamed the lack of KERS, and that's a great excuse, but I blame the Ferrari carrot dangling in front of the Italian's eyes: he really wasn't the same driver as he had been in qualifying, or even in previous races.

Good point on Ferrari's ability to use cash to disrupt other teams. Though I did enjoyed reading Luca di Montezemolo's recent suggestion that the top teams sell their cars to lower teams. It would make for great competition and he made a point about it being possible for a Chinese driver on a Chinese team to win his home Grand Prix in a Ferrari. The host country's fans would be enthralled, rating would be up, and Ferrari would get even more chances to win GP's. Oh, and as for your example of Fisichella, I can't fault him for that - I'd love a shot at driving for Ferrari too!

I'd rather have a win to my name than be a Ferrari No 2 driver. Nobody lists the names of the Ferrari No 2s, but the list of GP winners puts you up with the greats like Fangio, Clark, Senna, Mansell et al.

As for the Montezemalo's suggestion of plastering the field with Ferraris, you have to bear in mind that Ferrari's customer engines have never been quite as good as the works cars, and there have been many incidents in the past where a customer team waves through a works car without making a competition out of it. IMO such an idea could damage the actual racing. Maybe it would work if they did what works in Modern Pentathlon where the riders ride each others' horses? Or they'd have a lottery for which driver drove which Ferrari, just to keep them honest.

I don't think such a suggestion would work out well overall though, teams like Williams and Sauber as well as the smaller teams would lose out. They'd get less sponsorship, less money and be forced into choosing either a Ferrari or a McLaren ultimately.

I believe Montezemolo was talking about making the entire chassis/engine combo available to the smaller teams. It is a very interesting idea. Close to what Indycar/CART used to be when you had a few major chassis suppliers and teams could mix and match engines, it made for great racing. Here is the article: http://www.roadandtrack.com/column/f1-must-change-to-prosper

I'm quite familiar with the idea, it's been knocking about for years. My point was that if Ferrari release second rate engines for their customer teams, and also have unwritten rules about not competing with the parent company, just providing a whole car won't change the Ferrari mentality.

As for Indycar/CART, how can anything that involves driving around in circles all day be considered an improvement on F1 - or even interesting?

You'd have to ask Emerson Fittipaldi, Nigel Mansell, Juan Pablo Montoya, Jacques Villeneuve, Mario Andretti, Rubens Barrichello or even (if you could) Ayrton Senna what the attraction is to F1 racers driving or testing Indycars - since they all did.

Most of those drivers only moved after their F1 careers were already over, or after they fell out with someone. They got paid to move. We don't get paid to watch it and personally I find it contrived and boring. That isn't to say F1 doesn't have its moments, but oval racing is something you either love or hate and I don't love it.

"...Red Bull, a best-selling energy drink which goes well with vodka..."

"Goes well" is a questionable way for TE to describe a caffeinated alcoholic energy drink, as the caffeine apparently can mask the influence of the alcohol, leading to misinterpretation of the actual level of intoxication.

Adrian Newey is clearly the cornerstone to Red Bull's F1 success. Take Mr. Newey out of the equation and you have a team qualifying in grid position 10 or below. I give Christian Horner enormous credit for creating the working atmosphere that lured Mr. Newey to Red Bull. However, take away racing's best aerodynamicist and his team would not be winning F1 championships.

Formula one has a history of racing teams run, if not by soft drinks companies, by outfits other than retail automobile manufacturers such as Brabham and Cooper. Even Ferrari was founded, and continues to this day, to sell sports cars to fund a racing company, not the other way round. Red Bull may not have been a racing company to begin with, but they purchased a well established team, brought in a leading designer, and became successful after switching to a Ferrari engine. What they brought to the table was sponsorship money, and they were far from the first beverage manufacturer to do that.

It's fantastic for F1. Goes to show a non-car manufacturer outfit can still make it. Now if only a small independent with small sponsorship can win a race or two, we'd have belief in the underdog again.

And, no, sorry, Mercedes is not "the most storied and long-established teams in the sport". Mercedes entered the competition in the late 90es when they pulled "West-McLaren-Mercedes" (back then tobacco ads were OK). They did seize on the opportunity, but if one wants to look for "the most storied and long-established teams in the sport", one should look at the very same Lotus that revolutionized the race, or the long-forgotten underdog of Ford, where "Benetton-Ford" launched the career of certain Mr. Schumacher, or at Williams, for heavens' sake!